1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to human operated computer workstations and terminal oriented computer systems and, more particularly, to a modularly structured computer control system providing a natural language interface allowing the synonymic referencing of the operative modules, or primative tasks, present therein and the perceptually channeled reflection of information provided to the system and the corresponding presentation of information returned by the system in specific response thereto.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The ability to efficiently utilize the available capabilities of modern computers is becoming increasingly limited by the degree of interactiveness of the user interface. Computers are only sophisticated tools that require the creative direction of an operator in order to accomplish useful work. That is, the heuristic abilities of the operator are required to augment the computational speed and accuracy of the computer. For the efficient application of the operator's heuristic abilities, the user interface must functionally reflect the abstracted manner in which the operator is capable of and, indeed, desires to interact with the computer. A further consideration in the functionality of the user interface is the operator's heuristic abilities to extract contextual or relational information from otherwise raw data, complicated by the limited raw data retention capability of the operator. Thus, the user interface must be capable of perceptually providing a great deal of computed information, all concurrently, to the operator. However, the perceptual means for communicating to the operator is generally quite limited. The video terminal is perhaps the most common computer communication device, yet its display area and corresponding available textual density is severely limited in comparison to the heuristic communication abilities of the operator. This is perhaps most evident in typical computer systems in their failure to perceptually discriminate between even the immediate representation of information provided to the system and such information generated, or retrieved, by the system and perceptually returned to the operator.
Typical user interfaces designed to facilitate the interaction between the user and the computer system utilize sequences of menus. These menus continually present the operator with the available courses of action, or features of the system to which access is immediately allowable. However, these menu maps also rigidly fix the trail that must be traversed by the operator in order to execute or even to arrive at a desired task.
Substantially more sophisticated user interfaces utilize artificial intelligence in the attempt to comprehend the requests and commands of the operator. The necessary contextual vagueness of even the most tersely phrased command or request, due to the otherwise unrestricted use of the human language, leads to the use of extremely complex computer systems as a minimum requirement for the support of the user interface. The extent of the support required may even be to the reasonable exclusion of the system's further ability to act on the command or request, once understood by the system.
The menu driven user interface, most typically, can be supplemented by a multiple window display technique. Windowing typically provides the successive partial overlay of menus by subsequent menus or information provided by the system in response to a request by the operator. While the textual amount of information available to the operator is not actually increased, there is a perceived increase due to the concurrentness of presentation. However, substantial information is obscured by subsequently presented menus, thereby reducing the concurrency of information available for consideration. Further, the operator's choice of information that can be displayed in concurrently presented windows is limited by the rigidity of the menu nature of the user interface.